Shades
of "Jurassic Park"! It's not every day that can you see
the mammoth head and shoulders of a fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex protruding
from the roof of a building in downtown Hollywood.

Well, actually, it is now...
since this t-rex is a permanent part of the new Ripley's Believe It
or Not Museum.

This giant, toothy dinosaur
looks as if he has just broken through the roof of the museum, and he's
chewing on their huge clock... (The hands of the clock, incidentally, move
backward, yet it keeps accurate time.)

Step into the museum's open
lobby, and
you're in for another surprise: there you'll find the massive feet
of the T-Rex, smashing down through the roof, partly crushing the box office!

Any new sign of life is certainly
welcome on the moribund Boulevard, but the Ripley museum actually has little
to do with Hollywood. (It is included in this chapter mainly because it
is located right in the center of the Hollywood
Boulevard tourist district.) Their so-called "Hollywood section"
is filled with busts of human freaks, not movie stars. Then again, Ripley's
glitzy presentation and overblown hypeis pure "Tinseltown."

( There was a second "Ripley's
Believe It or Not!" museum in Buena Park, right across the street
from the former Movieland Wax Museum. But
it closed in 2009. )

There
are almost 300 items on display here, running the gambit from miniature
pool tables to giant scale models of the Queen Mary. Alas, this museum
displays the same inclination towards the grotesque as the Orange County
Ripley's. If shrunken heads, human freaks, and three-headed babies are
your thing, then step right in. But if the idea of seeing a man impaled
on an iron rod (sticking in through his cheek, and emerging out of the
top of his head) gives you pause, then you might prefer the Guinness museum
next door or the Hollywood Entertainment
Museum down the street..

The bizarre and the fantastic
are what you will see here. At least replicas of the bizarre and
the fantastic; only a few of the exhibits are originals. Most appear to
be facsimiles of objects, and wax figures of people (except for that shrunken
head, which is supposed to be real).

Bear in mind that Robert
Ripley - who traveled to 190 countries
collecting these oddities - never said that all of his items were genuine.
He said "believe it or not"! And many of these supposed
oddities are indeed very hard to believe.

For instance, there is not
one, but three separate wax figure displays of men who could supposedly
climb into a red-hot oven holding an item of food (an apple, a leg of lamb...),
remain in the oven until the item they were holding was cooked, and then
emerge personally unscathed. Yeah... sure.

And are we really supposed
to believe that "The Lighthouse Man " of Chunking, China lived
his life with a candle growing out of the top of his head?

Other items are more believable,
but just slightly disgusting, such as a tiny fake "mermaid" once
displayed by P.T. Barnum as the real thing, or a video that shows a man
doing revolting things, such as putting a live mouse in his mouth, and
blowing up a balloon via his eye socket...

Some displays cater to our
sadistic curiosity: a torture chamber uses wax figures to demonstrate such
exotic forms of torment as nailing a man's hat to his head (a deed
attributed to Ivan the Terrible), or placing a person inside a spiked beer
barrel and rolling it down a mountain, or making a naked man climb a fiery-hot
greased pole, while bound and gagged. The walls of this chamber of horrors
are lined with actual instruments of torture: leg shackles, flesh pinchers,
etc.

Nearby, a black-hooded executioner
stands next to a pig dressed as a man. The pig was convicted of killing
a child, dressed in clothing, and executed.

Still
other items on display are merely peculiar: a life-size portrait of John Wayne
created out of household lint, for example, or a lumpy statue of Marilyn
Monroe made out of shredded dollar bills
($250,000 worth, or so they say). Or how about a scale model of the Golden
Gate Bridge made out of toothpicks? Or a human hair bikini (created by
a barber)?

And what are we to make of
a dragon boat made out of beef bones? Paintings made from butterfly wings?
A life-size cake in the shape of George Washington? A gum-wrapper paper
chain representing $1000 worth of gum? A beer bottle with a piece of wood
driven through it? A life-size figure of a child made out of buttons?

Then it's back to the gross.
Another room resembles an industrial boiler room, and is filled with grotesque
accident victims. One figure is of a man (Phineas P. Gage) impaled by a
4-foot-long crowbar, which enters his face beneath his left eye and emerges
from the back of his head. Another victim is impaled on a 27' wooden plank,
which is thrust through his back and out his chest - he supposedly walked
over half a mile under his own power after the accident. Most of these
galleries include video displays, which constantly run bizarre movies of
other assorted oddities.

One of the more interesting
items is a large, genuine slab of the Berlin Wall (decorated with graffiti),
which visitors can touch.

One attractive display is a
mock jungle of plants and animals, tiki gods & waterfalls. But as you
might expect, this hillside is studded with the busts of natives who practice
disfiguring arts - such as the Ubangis of Africa, who insert large disks
in their lips, or the ring-necked women of Burma. On one wall is a life-size
figure of a Mandan Indian man being strung up by hooks embedded in his
flesh in the rite of o-kee-pa (ala "A Man Called Horse").
Step out on a balcony here, and a crocodile at your feet suddenly leaps
at you from out of the shadows, with a loud roar.

The exhibit labeled as "Hollywood"
has little to do with Tinseltown. Instead, it contains figures of a man
who set records walking backward, villagers who share excess fingers on
their hands, and a triple-amputee who hitch-hiked across the continent.
This "Hollywood" room also includes a figure of the world's
tallest man (8', 11" RobertWadlow
), as well as a dwarf kept in a bird cage, and a table full of people who
have set bizarre eating records - one man ate a entire birch tree. (Ironically,
the Guinness Museum right next door also
has a life-size figure of Robert Wadlow...)

Another minor caveat: near
the museum's entrance is a mirror, with a sign that invites you to try
to mimic a bizarre, "girning" face. Near the end of the tour,
you pass this same mirror (from the other side), and you see that it is
really a two-way mirror, where visitors can watch other visitors making
fools out of themselves - while a sound track laughs uproariously in the
background. (This same tactless stunt was found at Ripley's Buena Park
museum.)

On a lighter note: have you
ever seen a 20-foot T-Rex wearing a Santa hat and a white beard? Drive
by Ripley's at Christmas time, and you will!

Open every day: 10 AM to 11 PM (weekends, until midnight).

Admission Price:

Adults (13-over):
$14.99
Children (5-12): $ 8.99

Getting
there:
The museum is located on the southeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and
Highland Avenue, just one block east of the Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
/ FromHollywood & Vine, go west on Hollywood Boulevard
(about 3/4 of a mile) and the museum will be on your left (south) side.
Look for the T-Rex!

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